Scientists study the world to gather knowledge. Engineers utilize this knowledge to solve problems and create a better world. This blog is about using biological knowledge to engineer better gardens, more efficient systems, tastier foods, and, well, anything else I can think of.

Wednesday, June 7, 2017

I recently had a discussion online
about the feasibility of sequestering carbon in the soil vs. just reducing how
much we produce. I have seen many articles lately where scientists say that it
just isn’t feasible to sequester carbon in the soil as the soil just doesn’t
hold enough carbon. I contended that this is incorrect and that it indicates a
lack of understanding of grassland ecosystems. See, the grasslands rely very,
very heavily on the carbon in the soil.

Unlike trees, which can suck up
huge amounts of water when it rains to help them survive dry times, grasses don’t
really have the luxury. They need to have the water in the soil where they can
use it. They do this by having deep roots that they store energy in as the growing season ends and use as a food source during the beginning of the next growing season. The
tissues that are left behind rot and add to the carbon content of the soil.
Some prairie grasses can have roots that run as deep as twelve feet, but will
routinely run three to four feet deep in most cases. The carbon, when added to
the soil, helps the soil act more like a sponge, soaking up rains and causing
very little runoff. This water is stored in the soil where the grasses can
access it to extend their growing season.

Naturally the conversation led to
Holistic Management and Allan Savory’s methods and I shared his TED video. One
person in the discussion shared in turn a take-down of said TED talk and I
found it rather interesting. Again, the rebuttal says that it is simply not
feasible to store the carbon in the soils. So, naturally, being the nerd that I
am, I thought I’d do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation on this. How much
land would we have to holistically manage to bring carbon back to
pre-industrial levels?

So first of all, let me pull a
couple of numbers from the two sources themselves.

Allan Savory says in the video that
about 2/3 of the world’s grasslands are desertifying. My research tells me that
the earth’s landmasses are 57.5 million square miles. Two thirds of that is
38.3 million square miles. He also says that we can restore half of the world’s
grasslands and bring the carbon in the atmosphere back to pre-industrial
levels. So half of that is 19.2 million square miles. So we have 19.2 million
square miles to restore.

Switching to the article rebutting
the video, let me pull the next number from there. The article says that there
are currently 240 Petagrams (a petagram is 1 trillion Kilograms) more of carbon in
the atmosphere now than in pre-industrial times. So this means that we need to
find a way to sequester 240 trillion kilograms of carbon into 19.2 million
square miles. Sounds daunting, but let’s make some assumptions and run the
numbers.

First of all, we need to set some
numbers relating to carbon in soil. So let me start by saying that as a
percentage of total soil, carbon percentage will be calculated by volume, not
by weight. This is typically how that’s done. So how much does it weigh? I did
a little research (okay, I asked a friend who has a PhD in soils engineering)
and what is commonly called “muck soil” or 100% organic matter, has a specific
gravity of 0.25 grams per cubic centimeter. Yup, it is pretty light. But it isn’t
100% carbon. It is composed of a few
other elements, mostly hydrogen and oxygen. Even though carbon dioxide also
contains oxygen, let’s make this a little more conservative and assume that
only 50% of that muck soil is actual carbon.

Now to depth. That’s the tricky
part, isn’t it? We tend to think that an inch of topsoil is good. But that is
more a forest environment. Grassland environments tend to pump the soil much
deeper. The bunching grasses that make up those environments almost universally
send their roots three feet deep or more, sometimes over ten feet. But let’s
make the calculation conservative again, shall we? Let’s only count the top foot
of soil in this calculation.

First, let’s narrow this down. How much
carbon do we need to sequester per acre of soil?

So 13%, and a conservative estimate
at that. It can take a while to reach that level. I think 1-2% is reasonable in
the first year. Maybe in a decade or two we can reach 13%, maybe even 20%. But
let’s talk context a little here. First of all, the biggest impediment of this
kind of solution is not the enormity of the task. It is that, for some reason,
people who want to help, people who want to do the right thing, are throwing their
might against this idea. They are dismissing it out of hand and saying that it
just won’t work. No, this isn’t the only solution, but it is a big one. It can
do a huge amount of good. So why are people spending so much time opposing it?

Second, right now, those same soils
are degrading at a rapid rate and turning into deserts. To do that, they have
to lose the carbon they once stored. So those same soils are currently
contributing to the carbon in the atmosphere at a rate that I don’t think is
fully understood. Just reversing that and turning them from a source to a sink
would make a huge difference.

This is a subject I have read a lot
about, studied extensively. And the second article, the one that is attempting
a take-down of Holistic Management, falls prey to a logical error, and it is
a big one. The first is that grassland ecosystems and forest ecosystems work
the same. They don’t. The grasslands function very differently. The article
tries to simplify the functioning of an entire environment down into a few
simple formulas. It isn’t that simple, though, and can’t be simplified like
that. The cycle of the animal impact is intimately connected with the water
cycle and the mineral cycle. Without that understanding, any logical argument
about why this solution won’t work is fundamentally flawed.

Ultimately, though, we can reduce the carbon output all we want, but as long as nothing is sequestering the carbon away, we are fighting a losing battle. We need to be finding ways to lock the carbon back away where it belongs: in functional, living ecosystems.

Wednesday, March 22, 2017

For the last several months, I have been throwing down a
whole lot of information. Thank you, loyal readers, for sticking with me. I am
going somewhere with this. There are a great number of techniques that can be
used to repair our degrading ecosystem, and do so while providing a comfortable
living for those doing the repairs. But people need to understand how this all
needs to work. We live in a society that is separated to a great extent from
nature. In order to fix what needs to be fixed, we need to first bring people
back to nature, to help them understand it and learn how to heal it.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. As I mention
regularly, this is an engineering blog. I do my best to use engineering problem
solving techniques. And the first and foremost among those is this: if you wish
to solve a problem, you first have to define the problem. So, what is the
problem we are facing? And I don’t mean global warming, degrading farm land, or
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Those are symptoms. What is the problem? Let
me offer my viewpoint on this.

The problem, as I see it, is an ultimate flaw with the
changes made during the Industrial Revolution. Bear with me here. See, prior to
the Industrial Revolution, some 90% of humanity lived a pastoral existence on
small family farms. When the Industrial Revolution hit, it needed two things to
function and grow: it needed workers, and it needed consumers. It is basic
supply and demand. So farmers were encouraged, and sometimes forced, to leave their
land and move to the cities. They were promised a better life and more
prosperity. For the most part, that prosperity was finally realized during the
50s with an expansion of the middle class.

But it proved to be short-lived. As an economy grows, it
builds wealth, actually creates it. For the last 15 years, those gains have largely gone to the elite and the middle class has seen no appreciable
increase in earnings. Prices have continued to rise, though, so the difference
between the two has caused a contraction of the middle class, with millions of people watching their standard of living decrease with little hope of reversing the slide.

There is also a more insidious problem. The Industrial
Revolution taught us that we could be separated from the land and that even our
food production could be automated. The consequences have been disastrous.
Ultimately, humans are biological beings and are intimately connected to the
environment we live in in ways we are just beginning to understand. Land needs
to be managed or the biological processes that keep it alive degrade.

So here we are. The profits that can be extracted have been.
The rich are richer than they have ever been in the history of the world. They
are trying harder and harder to find ways to increase profits. Wages have
stagnated to the point that large swathes of humanity are barely making it
paycheck-to-paycheck. Our environment is forfeit. We are looking at the looming
threat of technological unemployment as more companies try to further cut
expenses by automating as many tasks as possible. The outlook is bleak.

Or is it? Maybe this is exactly what we needed right now. See,
momentum is the biggest obstacle to change. As long as everything is going
along great, people won’t make changes. Comfort is hard to compete with. But
discomfort and uncertainty, well, that has people craving change. Heck, a
presidential candidate used it as his campaign slogan a couple of years back. The
trick is for people to get to a very difficult realization: that they are on
their own. As long as you rely on those in power for your livelihood, you are
subject their whims and have little control. But when you decide to take
control of your own life, that’s where the magic happens.

The question is, how? We live in an urban, and largely
suburban, landscape. We like our connected, technological lifestyle. Who wants
to give that up to move back to the country and pursue a homestead lifestyle?
Well, lots of people, actually, but I am talking to the rest of us here. How
can we live our modern lifestyle and still pursue some measure of
self-sufficiency. Personally, I think that small-scale regenerative agriculture
is the key here.

Small-scale regenerative agriculture is the perfect solution
for the predicament we have ourselves in. It solves the problems on pretty much
every level. There have been a number of significant advances since the last
time we were an agrarian society. And I don’t mean in the technology of the
tractors currently tearing up vast swaths of farmland. Things like organic
farming (if you think this one is ancient, you probably don’t understand it),
aquaponics, and mycoculture have all come a long, long way in the last 200
years or so. Technology can be employed in ways never dreamed of even 30 years
ago. With careful layout and design, more food than ever can be grown in a
smaller space all while regenerating the environment.

So what can small scale regenerative agriculture do to solve
the problems at hand today? Let’s tackle them one by one and see.

Climate Change/Environmental Degradation

This one is probably the easiest to justify. Regenerative
agriculture is, by definition, regenerative. This means reducing monoculture,
increasing environmental diversity, and building soil. The simple process of
building soil means adding carbon to the soil, a process also called Carbon
Farming. With enough practitioners of this practice, significant amounts of
carbon could be sequestered into the soils of the earth. Plus, the restoration
of life to soil helps mitigate pollution and further increases environmental
diversity, which will breathe life into ecosystems beyond the farming
operation.

Stagnating Wages

In a household budget, there are two sides to the flow of
money: income and expenses. Most people are struggling through increases in
expenses while their wages have virtually stagnated for decades. It can be very
frustrating to find more and more ways to cut expenses just to make ends meet.
Introducing solar dollars to the household budget can breathe new life into the
flow of money. With new methods and technologies, this can happen with only
minimal additional effort on the part of the homeowner, but can result in a
much tastier and healthier diet.

Technological Unemployment

As most are aware, machines are going to be taking all the
jobs. I have heard projections as high as 60% of jobs will be lost over the
next 20 years to automation. Personally, I think this move is highly
shortsighted. While there will be a huge savings in production costs, that
doesn’t really help if everyone is unemployed and can’t afford to buy gadgets
at the new low cost. Regardless of how bad this move will allow companies to
shoot themselves in the foot, it is coming. So, what can be done about it?

Simply put, people are going to have to become more
self-sufficient. They will need to stop relying on employers for their
livelihood. This used to be the way nearly everyone lived before the Industrial
Revolution and they did so by living primarily off of solar dollars.
Sustainable agriculture allows a return to this paradigm, allowing individuals
to reduce or eliminate reliance on employers.

Urban Malaise

I read a comment recently that I thought was spot-on: You
don’t hate Mondays. You hate capitalism. Maybe it is capitalism. Maybe it is
our lack of connection to the natural world. Maybe it is a lack of meaning in
our lives. Maybe it is knowing that we spend our days toiling away to build
value for someone else. Maybe it is pollution. Whatever the cause, a general
feeling of malaise, discontent, unhappiness, and restlessness are prevalent in
our society. Small-scale regenerative agriculture hits pretty much all of those
causes head-on. You are building value for yourself on your own land. You are
working with and regenerating nature. I don’t think it is that hard to
understand why gardeners are a happy lot.

Nutrition

As the nutrients are increasingly extracted from farmland,
our food loses its nutritional value. We become disconnected from the nutrient cycle. By regenerating our own land and building nutrient-rich soil, we
increase the nutrient content of the foods we eat. And by doing that
small-scale, we reconnect ourselves to our own nutrient cycle.

Health

Gardening is a great way to keep active. There is definitely
work involved. This can help with fitness and flexibility. Reconnecting our
bodies to the natural nutrient cycle will also help as our bodies will be
getting all the nutrient-rich foods they need.

The best part of all this is that we don’t need to drop our
modern lifestyle to realize all these benefits. Technology can play a big part
in reducing the labor on gardening while still improving output. Universal
availability of the internet means you can still ply your trade or profession
by working part time online throughout the week to bring in additional income.
We really can have the best of both worlds.

So, tell me, what did I miss? Are there other ways
small-scale urban agriculture can change the world?

Thursday, March 9, 2017

For the last several months, I have been hinting at this
grand project I have been working on. I have felt it more important thus far to
lay the foundation to talk about some of the concepts being implemented onsite.
But I think I am in pretty good shape right now in terms of concepts being out
there, and before I jump into my next series of posts, I wanted to take a
moment to talk about the project I am currently working on.

The site is called Phoenix ASH & Regrowth. It is a half
acre site in the Sunnyslope area a little north of downtown Phoenix. The
project is an attempt to achieve as high a level of self-sufficiency as
possible while simultaneously repairing the ecosystem onsite. The project site
will also serve as a demonstration site to help promote these ideas and make
significant improvements on a wide variety of fronts including food production,
nutrition, flood prevention, urban heat island effect, air pollution, economic
resiliency, erosion control, biodiversity, and much more. To achieve this,
nearly everything we do onsite is to achieve one of two goals: 1) Restore soil carbon, and 2)
Promote biodiversity. While this may sound a little overly simplistic, these
two things, when working in conjunction, cause a cascade of healthy biological
functions that achieve everything else.

Let me take a moment to describe how this cascade works.
Increasing the amount of carbon in the soil does two things primarily. The
first is that it increases absorption of rainwater. This increases biological
activity and helps mitigate flooding. The second is that it increases the
fertility of the soil. As I have explained previously, carbon in the soil feeds
the soil biome and increases the fertility of the soil and the availability of
nutrients in the soil. By increasing the available moisture in the soil and fertility
of the soil, plant growth is encouraged. Remember, as a gardener, my job is not
to take care of the plants. My job is to take care of the soil and the soil
takes care of the plants.

Once we have widespread growth of plants, we move to the
next level. As I have already mentioned, the driver of ecosystem processes is
the cycling of living matter from one organism to the next. This is where
diversity comes in. Different organisms make use of different food sources and
bring different benefits to the system. Rather than trying to dig through the
science of biological systems, most of which doesn’t really exist yet (don’t
even get me started on the faults with reductionist thinking employed by modern
science), it is best to let the ecosystem find its own healthy equilibrium. We
do that by including everything in the whole. There really are no weeds. The
only caveat is that they must provide more benefit than they detract. So a pine
tree was removed from the site because all it provided was shade. Oleanders
were removed because they are highly toxic. And there are a couple of weeds we
remove because of toxicity. Otherwise, everything is welcome.

Once the plants are growing, each one is valued for the
benefits it brings. Edibles are harvested for human consumption. Grass and
forbs are used for forage for the animals. Dead leaves and grass are harvested
for compost. Trees are pollarded to provide wood to build more soil. At each
level, the plant material runs through its cycle and is returned to the soil,
increasing soil carbon and helping plant growth and diversity.

So let me talk for a moment about the various methods we
employ onsite to achieve all of this:

Holistic Management, as taught by the Savory Institute, is
more of a guiding principle. Everything we do is viewed through the lens of
Holistic Management and its principles. It is through Holistic Management that
we can make the best decisions for how to weave the myriad methods together
into one cohesive structure. The site also serves as the Arizona Savory Hub
(ASH) and the first urban demonstration site for the Savory Institute. We are
very excited to demonstrate that Holistic Range Management, which is typically
managed on large tracts of land in rural areas, can be applied in an urban
setting.

Permaculture

Permaculture is another guiding principle. The permaculture
core principles are also core values and guide what we do and how we rebuild a
complete ecosystem onsite.

Animal Impact, as described in Holistic Management is an
important part of how nutrients are cycled through plants and back into soil.
Right now, we just have chickens and are using them to process forage and
create compost. However, long term plans include goats and sheep, and maybe
even miniature cows or rabbits. Each animal will have its own impact on the
ecosystem, improving diversity and nutrient cycling.

Organic gardening, in its ideal form, builds soil carbon,
reducing the need for synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. By not
using chemistry to manage a biological system, the biological system is allowed
to flourish, encouraging diversity and growing topsoil. Everything we do onsite
at Phoenix ASH & Regrowth is organic.

While some of the organic matter is either processed in
place (as in animal impact) or allowed to lie where it falls, much of the
organic matter produced onsite is processed through the composting facility
onsite. This turns decaying organic matter into high quality topsoil more
rapidly so it can be spread back out where it is needed most. In addition, we
use the chickens (Animal Impact) to process the compost. This allows the
chickens to feed off of whatever they deem edible in the compost, including
insects that are attracted to the rotting material. It also allows their
droppings to be immediately incorporated into the compost. This helps the
compost get hot and complete its cycle quickly. And when it is time for the
compost to be turned? The chickens help with that, too.

At just 9” of rain a year, Phoenix is a desert. But with
careful planning and a little infrastructure, the rain can be stretched really
far. To do, this, we use two primary strategies at Phoenix ASH & Regrowth.
The first is rainwater barrels. There are two rainwater barrels on each of the
three buildings onsite. The two smaller buildings have smaller, flattened
barrels that sit up against the building. These each hold a little over 500
gallons. On the largest building, there are two larger barrels, each holding
about 2600 gallons. The smaller tanks are perhaps a little undersized for the
areas they catch, and the larger tanks are a bit oversized. However, with a
little planning and some plumbing, we are able to drain the smaller tanks into
the larger as they fill up, assuring that no rain is lost. This water is used
to water the gardens.

The second type of rainwater harvesting comes from offsite
flow, or water that is flowing onto the property. The property has a wash
flowing through it. While this was a major problem for previous owners, it is
seen as an advantage at Phoenix ASH & Regrowth. With a little regrading,
the site was turned into a series of retention basins. As each retention basin
fills, it overtops into the basin below it. By doing this, all, or nearly all,
of the offsite flow can be captured and stored in the ground. This has the
added benefit of reducing downstream flooding. The best part is that the first
basins built are already growing lots of vegetation and thus building soil
carbon. The change in water infiltration is already visible, with no water
standing in these basins a mere 24 hours after a big rain. The newer basins,
which haven’t had much of a chance to grow vegetation yet, take 3 or 4 days to
drain, even though they get less water.

Nitrogen Producing Trees

In desert ecosystems, and in particular degraded desert
ecosystems, there is often a lack of nitrogen in the soil. This can be a
limiting factor for the growth of plants and thus the ecosystem as a whole.
Nitrogen producing trees, such as palo verde, acacia, and mesquite can make a
big difference in this area. Not only do they fix nitrogen from the air and
make it into a usable form, but many are well adapted to dry climates with poor
soil. They are drought tolerant and fast growing.

As the trees grow, they produce a great amount of biomass.
Every two years, the trees at Phoenix ASH & Regrowth are pollarded, and a
few select trees are coppiced. The branches and twigs that are cut off are used
for a variety of purposes. They are used as feedstock for growing mushrooms, some are used to produce biochar. The bulk are chipped to either produce mulch
for various areas around the site or as a bulk carbon source in the compost
bins. The biomass produced by pollarding and coppicing becomes a large portion
of the biomass we use to feed the soil.

In addition, trees typically have a root structure that
mimics the size and extent of the canopy above. When the tree is trimmed back,
the tree abandons roots and pulls back, adding as much carbon down in the soil
as is harvested from above.

Some of the branches that are either trimmed out or are the
result of random pruning throughout the year are used to create new garden
beds. This use of hugelkultur adds a long-lasting source of carbon to the soil
and provides a lasting source of food for the soil biome where it is needed
most.

Woody debris that is too big for the chipper, unusable for
mushroom feedstock, or otherwise scrap material is processed into biochar. The
biochar is added to the compost. Once there, it collects nutrients through the
processing process. Then it is added to the soil with the rest of the compost
where it is used to improve soil quality in perpetuity.

Growing mushrooms is difficult in the desert, but it can be
managed. Mushrooms are used in the intermediary process between wood chips and
soil creation and provide an additional product. We are also working to find
ways to use mushrooms to improve degraded areas of the site. This is a
technology that has a lot of potential and we are working on finding a way
around the challenges to best make it work.

Phoenix ASH & Rebirth is located in a very brittle
environment and the bulk of the site is being managed with this in mind.
However, many of our common vegetables require quite a bit more water, thus
necessitating a non-brittle microclimate. In this interest, we are looking for
technologies that help use the water resources available onsite to their
maximum utility. Aquaponics has some great potential in this respect, being
particularly efficient with both water and nutrients. However, as a soil-less
technology, it doesn’t fit as well with the goals of the site. We are exploring
other options to improve the technology to be more organic.

As you can see, we have a whole lot going on for just a half
acre. But combined, these techniques work closely together to make some
significant changes in a degraded environment. Please help me in spreading the
word. If we can turn a half acre in downtown Phoenix into a productive food
forest and organic farm, it can be done anywhere. We just have to have a way to
get these concepts out there and teach people to implement them. This world is
fixable, and it can be done using the techniques provided to us by nature.
Let’s get on this.

Saturday, February 11, 2017

I love an elegant design. But what is an elegant design?
Elegant is defined as pleasingly ingenious and simple. From an engineering
standpoint, an elegant design is typically a design that achieves multiple
functions through simplicity rather than complexity. This is easily accomplished with biological systems with just a little thought. Think about the process
happening. Is there work you are doing that something else would happily do for
you? Are there organisms that could be inserted into the process that would
provide benefit without any real loss?

While I have tried to achieve this with my living systems
since I was a teenager, one of the best examples I found was from Paul Stamets.
He explained that if you compost wood chips, you can get compost, albeit
slowly. If you grow mushrooms on the wood chips first, you get mushrooms. Then
the spent mushroom blocks can be composted to still get compost, and faster.
The addition of the right organism in the middle of the process makes all the
difference.

Such is the way with chickens and compost. Chickens are omnivores. Their natural diet is a mixture of plants and bugs, with a healthy mixture of seeds thrown in. Commercial chicken feeds are mostly grain based. They give the chickens the basic nutritional needs, but don't really give them anything extra. Allowing the chickens to process compost on the other hand, is a natural fit that achieves multiple functions.

Chicken compost structure from the inside

For our purposes, we took an existing structure that was built for compost. It was constructed out of PVC pipe and wire and measured 11' by 14' and tall enough to stand comfortably in. We moved it into a corner that was out of the way and put an existing chicken coop inside. The coop gave the chickens a place to roost and lay and gave them protection from the rain and sun. Then we built four compost bins, one cubic yard each, using the same PVC pipe and wire techniques. The doors on the front of the bins rotate down. Then, since this is Phoenix and it is hot here, I installed a mister system over the compost bins to keep the compost wet and the chickens comfortable in the summer.

To feed the chickens, I toss compost out into the open area. I also wander around and harvest a big bucket of weeds daily for the chickens to eat. Grain is given supplementally as needed and just to make sure they have enough food. The chickens pick through the weeds and kitchen scraps and eat what they want. The rest becomes litter under their feet and they manure on it. When the litter layer builds up enough, we scoop it up and toss it in one of the bins. Then we spread out a starter layer of straw or drier weeds and start the process over again. I hope to use wood chips soon as well.

Once the compost is in the bins, it heats up to hot compost range within a few days. Once a week, we drop the front gate to the bin, and spread the compost out a little. The chickens dive right in and hunt for bugs. After a day or so, we scoop it up, water it a little, and mound it back up in a different bin. The process produces compost remarkably rapidly. We are actually having trouble keeping the temperature down enough on the compost bins. We don't want them so hot that they are essentially burning off the carbon we are trying to capture.

Store bought eggs mixed witheggs from our chickens

The best part is the change in the chickens. They have a habitat that is full of vertical relief to explore, attractive to bugs, and gives them lots of room to scratch around in. They have been much happier and engaged since moving into the compost bin. Plus, the change in the eggs has been remarkable. See, the color of the yolk is a good indicator of how healthy the chicken's diet is. Pale yellow yolks indicate a poor diet, usually of mostly grains. Darker yellow to orange means the diet is significantly improved. I hear that with attention to a great diet, the egg yolks can be almost made red. I haven't gotten there yet.

Personally, I think that this could be done on a larger scale to take advantage of large scale food waste. Restaurants could collect food waste separately and they could be collected daily, or every few days at the least. Then the food scraps could be dumped into a chicken compost facility with several hundred chickens. They will eat what appeals to them. The remnants could be mixed with wood chips, also from municipal waste, and composted. The chickens could be brought back once a week or so to further pick through the composting material, keeping bugs down and helping it compost. At the end of the product, there is great compost produced, happy chickens, healthy eggs, and a reduction of the trash stream.

Wednesday, January 25, 2017

Holistic Management is an interesting set of concepts,
techniques and methodologies. While the application is typically used to make
ranches profitable and regenerative, it actually has broad applicability. Many
of the other concepts have great potential beyond the ranch. Of these, perhaps
my favorite is the concept of solar dollars.

According to Holistic Management, there are three kinds of
wealth: mineral dollars, solar dollars, and paper dollars. Paper dollars are
the easiest to understand. That is the actual money we are all familiar with.
Mineral dollars are resources you have, like water, soil, rock, maybe even gold
if you are lucky enough to have a gold mine on your property. Some mineral
dollars are renewable, like fertile soil and water, while others are not, like
that gold mine. Solar dollars, though, are the product of photosynthesis.
Fruits, vegetables, wood, stuff like that. You use your mineral dollars to
create your solar dollars.

This seems like a pretty simple concept. So why, of all the
important concepts of Holistic Management, did I pick this one to expound on?
This concept is really important when it comes to the application of everything
else I am talking about. See, where this concept really becomes important is in
the area of resource conversion.

Harvesting solar dollars (pollarding) to create more solardollars and more mineral dollars

Resource conversion is the conversion of one form of dollar
into another. For example, you can buy a bag of composted steer manure with
your paper dollars to help build your mineral dollars in the form of soil. You
can then use that investment in mineral dollars to create solar dollars in the
form of fruit from your fruit trees. Then you can pollard the fruit trees,
harvesting solar dollars in another form. You can then chip them and convert them
to another form of solar dollars: mushrooms. When the sawdust block is finished
producing mushrooms, you can compost it and create mineral dollars in the form
of improved soil.

The thing is, there are hundreds of ways to create and
utilize solar and mineral dollars. It is really up to you to determine what is
the best way to use them on your property. The important thing to realize is
that these things have value, and not just some pie-in-the-sky theoretical
value. In some cases, they give you a product to sell, and in others they
prevent you from having to spend your hard-earned paper dollars, and in yet
others, they give you a measure of resiliency.

Take a look around at your yard. What are you doing to
preserve and earn solar dollars? Are you composting? Are you maximizing the
production potential of the land you have through food forests? What can you do
better? Remember, there is more than one way to earn income.

Sunday, January 15, 2017

As those of you who are frequent readers of my blog probably
know, my hobby is engineering with biological systems. In everything I do, I do
my best to be holistic. Each organism in an ecosystem has a job and the whole
works as a whole when all of the necessary pieces are where they are supposed
to be and doing the job they evolved to do. The problem with the modern world
is that our ecosystems are so degraded that the animals are often absent
completely or at the least rarely seen in natural systems. As such, it is so
easy to forget that they are an integral part and are often seen as pests or
otherwise harmful. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Animals are an
integral part of the nutrient cycling function of a healthy ecosystem. The
tricky part, though is to manage the animals. It's important to choose the right animals (or
encourage the right ones to come to you) and help them have the right impact.

There is no place this axiom is more true than in a brittle
ecosystem. The inconsistency of moisture in an area that has distinct rainy and
non-rainy seasons means that the organic matter (typically perennial bunching
grasses) cannot break down into its component nutrients when exposed to open
air like it does in a non-brittle environment, one with constant exposure to moisture.
But the cycling of nutrients is critical for any ecosystem to function. It is
how each and every organism functions within the ecosystem. For the plant, the
fungus, the bacteria, and the animal each, it is their food source.

In a brittle environment, the dead grasses still need to be
removed so the plants have room to grow at the beginning of the next rainy
season. As any gardener knows, the best thing for all that grass is to finely
chop it, compost it in a warm, moist environment, and deposit the finished
compost back on the ground where it can be worked into the soil. Being a bit of
a mad scientist, I propose we automate the process. Let’s make the composting
unit mobile, something that moves around
and continually collects the grasses. I think I will call this new
invention a “cow.”

This is basically how a ruminant works. They are mobile
organic matter collection and composting units. They provide the moisture
needed to break the plant matter down and keep the food web going. Remember,
those grade school science books downplayed the importance of poop in the
nutrient cycling of an ecosystem. In reality so many more nutrients are cycled
through dung than through dead bodies.

Ecosystems develop through an intricate process called
“evolution.” Often, evolution picks some minor function, one often overlooked,
and makes it an integral part of the whole. This is absolutely true with the
animal impact on a grassland. Yes, the cow eats the grass, but they miss a lot.
They dung and urinate all over everything and tend to not eat the contaminated
vegetation. But all of the vegetation needs to be lowered to ground level.

Also, bare ground is pretty much the biggest problem in a
brittle environment. As ground sits bare (nothing growing from it and no plant
litter covering it), there is nothing to replenish the soil carbon content and
it just bakes in the sun. Bare soil loses its carbon content eventually and
forms a hydrophobic (water repelling) crust. This crust matures over time, becoming more and more
effective at repelling what rain comes to it. As the environment further
degrades, the soil crust forms a permanent crust, grows a sad layer of algae
and gets protection in a state park from people who can’t tell the difference between a
healthy ecosystem and a biological response to extreme environmental
degradation.

In order to keep the grassland healthy, the soil crust needs
to be broken regularly and the uneaten litter scattered over the surface, along
with a healthy dose of dung and urine applied. But this process breaks down
when the cattle spread out across the landscape, grazing peacefully. The hooves
naturally break the crust, but not when they step gingerly. The weight of the
animals crushes the dead clumps of grass and scatters the remnants across the
bare soil, but not when they walk carefully between the grasses. The piles of
dung help fertilize, but not when they are twenty or thirty feet apart.

See, the ecosystem doesn’t respond specifically as a single
block. Each clump of grass responds to the pressures and stimuli it is
subjected to. Grass is overgrazed a clump at a time. Grass is undergrazed a
clump at a time. And the two can be right next to each other. When cows are
allowed to live a leisurely, spread out life with plenty of room to wander and
plenty of time to pick and choose what they eat, they do exactly that.

It is the natural system of predator and prey that brings
the whole thing together. In the wild, the great herds of ungulates are
subjected to the predation of pack hunting predators like lions and wolves. The
herds bunch together for safety. But in bunching, they eat huge amounts of food
and leave behind huge amounts of dung and urine. In the excitement of being
bunched and worrying about predators, they aren’t careful about where they step
and trample the bunches of grass and break up the soil crust.

See, it is only the original system that works completely to
maintain the grassland ecosystem. The herds have to be big enough that they can
eat or spoil the food, then move on before the grass starts growing back. They
have to be bunched and excited to disturb the ground just right to get the
benefits.

The problem is that those great herds are largely gone, as
are their pack hunting predators. But if the land dies without them, what are
we going to do?

It turns out that Allan Savory has worked out a way to mimic
the impact of the animals and built a whole system around it. The system is
called Holistic Management. It uses smaller paddock sizes to mimic the bunching
and manage the time spent grazing. It even turns out that the excitement and
trampling can be mimicked without the stress of predators. Ivan Aguirre, a
rancher in Mexico, uses mesquite hulls, the parts filtered out after the
milling of mesquite pods, as a treat. Mesquite pods are naturally sweet and the
cows get so excited about their treat (a waste product, really), that they
trample everything to get to the hulls.

Unfortunately, it is likely that the great herds are gone
forever. However, with enough dedicated people and the will to make a
difference, we have the tools to restore the grasslands of the world to some of
the most productive ecosystems in the world.

Sunday, January 8, 2017

As I began to delve deeper into Holistic Management, there
were several concepts I thought were just brilliant. The first one is the
Brittleness Scale. It is quite simple, really, it is just a scale from one to
ten that describes the inconsistency of moisture throughout the year. A
rainforest, where it rains almost every day, would be a one. A deep desert, on
the other hand, where it only rains a few weeks out of the year, would be a 10.

On the surface, this seems pretty simple of a concept, and
not really worthy of a whole blog post. However, like many simple concepts,
just a little bit of digging into the impacts reveals just how important of a
concept it is.

Do me a favor. Go look up Google Earth. Keep it at a global
level. Scroll around a little and look at the little blue-green-tan orb we live
on. I’ll wait. Did you notice how the land masses of the world are
predominantly either green or tan in color? That is your brittleness scale
right there. For the most part, the green areas are non-brittle, and the tan
ones are brittle. Obviously, it is a scale, but it’s a good general rule. Now
think about the population centers of the world. Where do all the people live?
Southeast Asia. Europe. Eastern United States. The west coast of Australia. Japan.
The list goes on. These areas are predominantly green. The only
significant exception to this rule is the Middle East, but those civilizations
started in the river valleys, primarily of the Nile and the Tigris and Euphrates
rivers, prone to seasonal flooding and deposits of rich soils.

The non-brittle environments are easy places to be
successful in agriculture. There is always plenty of water for humans and our
crops. The soil is always trying to build itself up. Heck, just leave it fallow
for a couple of years, and the weeds move in and build the soil back for us. Because
of this, these areas are where we had the stability and prosperity to settle
down and develop civilization, including institutions of higher learning. They are where science was
developed. They are where that science was used to study the best way to
maintain crops and soil fertility.

So what’s the big deal? Why is this such an important idea?
Well, the first thing is a subtle point, but like most subtle points, makes all
the difference in the world. Brittleness doesn’t indicate the amount of water
an environment receives, but rather the consistency of available moisture,
including humidity. See, an environment functions by breaking down organic
matter from one organism to another until it is returned to its constituent
parts, returned to the soil, then upcycled into plants to begin the process
again. Every level of this process requires available moisture to break down
organic material.

When I first moved to Prescott, AZ in 2002, there was a
rather large tree, probably 30’ tall, that was right next to a highway I
traveled regularly. The tree had already been dead long enough that it had
lost all of its bark and all of its small branches. But the large branches and
the trunk remained. It wasn’t for another 4 or 5 years that it really started
losing the big branches in earnest. It was probably around 2010 that the tree
finally lost its last branch and a little after that that it fell over. In a
nonbrittle environment, this process wouldn’t have taken more than a few years
rather than the probably 15 or more it took in this brittle environment. And
Prescott is probably a 7 on the brittleness scale.

When an environment is extremely dry and has little to no
rain for long periods (Prescott can go 5 to 6 months at a time with no rain at
all), the biological processes that drive can only operate for, at most, a
couple of months out of the year. So how does the ecosystem function without
the extra moisture?

It turns out that nature is extremely adaptable, and
perennial bunching grasses end up being key to brittle ecosystems. They do
several things for the ecosystem. At the beginning of the rainy season, the
grasses expend stored energy from their roots, sacrificing the roots and
pushing their blades skyward as fast as possible. Once they are full grown,
they make use of the fertility in the soil, the available rain, and plentiful
sunshine to replenish the stored energy in their roots. Once the roots are
ready, they produce seed heads and go dormant, usually about the time their
rainy season is over. There they will sit until the next rainy season.

But they have some pretty strict requirements. They can be
grazed during the rainy season, but if they are overgrazed during this time,
they won’t have the energy to store in their roots and take full advantage of
next year’s rainy season. They also need to be grazed completely before next
year’s rainy season. If the dead foliage isn’t removed, the new foliage will be
choked out just as it is trying to grow. Lastly, it needs a heavy dose of
fertilizer. I’ll get into the animal impact needed to make this happen in my
next post.

One of the most important impacts of this environment is how it manages its own water. The annual cycle of the grasses sacrificing their
roots and growing new ones has the effect of “pumping” carbon into the soil.
That carbon feeds the soil microbes and increases fertility. More importantly,
for every 1% increase in soil carbon, every acre has the ability to store an
ADDITIONAL 60,000 gallons of water.
So if there is only one percent carbon in a field, it can only store 60,000
gallons of water when the rains come. But if you can get that number up to 5%,
the same acre of land can store 300,000 gallons of water. And the prairie
grasses can send their roots 6 feet or more into the soil, helping that water
penetrate deep into the soil, where it will be stored.

Most brittle environments are prone to heavy rains when the
rains do come. Without this natural cycle and a healthy grassland ecosystem,
the soil carbon is lost and the water runs off, causing erosion as well as lost
moisture. When the grasslands are restored to a more natural system, so much
water is stored that ephemeral streams often start flowing again, providing a
permanent supply of water to the animals that roam in these environments.

Grassland ecosystems can be some of the most productive on
the planet, but only if the natural processes that make them so are fully
understood and upheld. If the right level of animal impact is fostered, these
ecosystems can begin the process of self-repair in just a couple of years and
provide a great source of solar dollars (I’ll talk about that one in two
posts).

Sunday, January 1, 2017

Every now and then I find a concept that just blows my mind.
Not because it is difficult to understand, but because it shifts my worldview
and causes me to see the world around me in a whole new light. Often, the new
information latches onto a generally accepted concept that just bothers me. It
nags at the back of my mind because it doesn’t feel true, but everyone accepts
it as true because they have been told it is. But then this new idea comes
along and adds clarity to the issue.

In this case, the idea that never made sense to me is that
agriculture, particularly the raising of cattle, is responsible for some huge
percentage, about 9%, of global production of greenhouse
gasses. In reading most articles, the assumption is that it isn’t just poorly
managed stocks. Most make the assumption that it is the cows themselves and it
couldn’t possibly be any other way. That makes no sense to me. Pretty much all
of the grasslands of the world were home to great herds of large hoofed
animals before man came along. Herds of bison in the North American Great
Plains were reported to be in the tens of millions of animals. So how could it
possibly be that the natural, healthy condition was home to that many large
animals, but now we can’t possibly handle a similar number without doing severe
damage to our atmosphere and environment?

The answer came from a biologist named Allan Savory. I have
written about him before, but have since learned much more about his ideas and
methods and I have to say that I am sold. The answer is quite simply that, as
humans, our centers of population and learning are mostly in areas that have
consistent moisture throughout the year. These are very productive ecosystems
that support large populations and we know well how to keep them healthy and
productive. They also tend to be conducive to growing forests.

The grasslands of the world, on the other hand, operate
completely differently. The inconsistent
moisture won’t support as many trees, but rather favors a completely different
type of environment, one dominated by perennial grasses. As I mentioned before, this cycle of plant growth and decomposition is the primary cycling of nutrients in an ecosystem, and the primary driver of life. Because of the inconsistent availability of moisture, the moisture required to biologically break
down organic matter and foster the creation of the soil is simply not present
for much of the year. This means that as a plant (in this case, the grasses)
grows during the wet season, it produces body mass. As it runs through its
annual cycle and sheds biomass, the biomass doesn’t simply fall to the ground
and decompose. So how does the grassland ecosystem function?

It turns out that a completely different method of
decomposition is utilized by the grasslands. The decaying grasses get the
moisture they need to decompose in the gut of large ruminant animals, such as
cows and bison. The animals then deposit the proto-soil in the form of urine
and dung. This then continues to decompose and fertilize the soil.

Same location as above, after 36 years of using HolisticManagement practices. 25% bare soil, 1% soil crust, 11species of perennial grasses

However, the whole process is very fragile and is contingent
on several factors. The right kind of animal impact needs to be maintained. The
grasses rely heavily on the top of the plant being removed by the animals
between the completion of the growing season and the beginning of the next
growing season. Some of this happens via eating and some happens via trampling.
This happens best in the presence of huge herds that are bunched and excited
because of the presence of pack hunting predators, such as lions. In this
configuration, huge numbers of animals are constantly on the move. They consume
the bulk of the tops of the plants, trample on the rest, and fertilize what’s
left. When the next rainy season comes around, the perennial grasses are ready
to leap off and complete their life cycle.

But when this cycle is disrupted, such as is the case over
most of the land masses on the planet, the grasses don’t get the cycle of
stress and rest they need to best complete their life cycle. Most of the
grasslands of the world are either overgrazed or over-rested, both equally
damaging to the perennial bunching grass.

This is an important environmental factor. As I mentioned
previously, the soil is a living thing. It needs to be fed, and it eats
decomposing organic matter, mostly plant. In the grasslands, a small percentage
of this comes from the animal dung, but really, the bulk of it comes from the
grasses themselves. See, in order to take advantage of the brief rainy season,
the grasses store a huge amount of energy in their roots. At the start of the
rains, the grasses shoot skyward, sacrificing those roots. They pull the energy
from the roots and allow them to die. Once the grass is to the proper height,
they begin the process of storing energy, growing new roots. The old roots then
decompose and feed the soil. This happens every year. The bunch grasses in
essence pump carbon into the ground to feed the soil.

As you might imagine, this is the single biggest carbon sink
on the planet, one that is currently not functioning, causing the soils to lose carbon to the atmosphere rather
than storing it in almost every grassland on the planet (about 60% of Earth’s
landmasses). But the effects aren’t just damaging to global warming. See, the
carbon in the soil, stored as humus, turns the soil into a giant sponge. When
the monsoon rains come, healthy grasslands with heavy amounts of humus in the
soil soak up the bulk of the rain. This stores the water in the soil, allowing
more and healthier grass to grow and creating a positive feedback loop. But
when the process is disrupted, the carbon disappears from the soils, causing
the soils to form a water-repelling crust, which increases flooding and erosion
while exacerbating the problem.

Holistic Management was developed by Allan Savory as a
series of techniques to best replicate the impact of the great herds without
actually restoring the great herds. Cows, sheep, and goats are typically used
to create the restoration, but have to be managed carefully to simulate the correct type of
impact.

There are a bunch of really important concepts from Holistic
Management, many more than can be outlined on a blog. I’ll select a couple of
the more important concepts to delve deeper into over the next several blog
posts. Over the next couple of posts, I will talk about the Brittleness Scale,
Animal Impact, and the concept of Solar Dollars. After that , I can delve into
some of the possible ways Holistic Management can be used to make real,
positive change in the world.

About Me

Disclaimer

I am not an expert on any of the topics presented here, merely an enthusiastic hobbyist. I claim no responsibility for how this information is used and make no guarantees that it is completely accurate, only accurate to the best of my knowledge.